Lee Gutkind Quotes

With Charles Woods, it was the first time I had ever seen tissue from a dead person used to save a human life. It piqued my curiosity.

The Church believes that human organs cannot be viewed as objects of purchase and sale. The transplantation of organs from a living donor can be based only on the voluntary self-sacrifice for the sake of another's life.

Five to six thousand people die every year waiting for organs, but nobody cares.

I encourage everyone I know to sign an organ donor card, but if someone doesn't want to sign, that's his or her choice. If someone isn't willing to give an organ, however, why should that person be allowed to receive an organ?

Given my absolute druthers, I would certainly like to see that every part of my body is used for spare parts for science.

I hope more people decide to become organ donors.

The practice of physic [Medicine] is jostled by quacks on the one side, and by science on the other.

My success in transplanting arteries between animals has pioneered surgical techniques that being closer the day when hearts and other organs will be transplanted into humans. No effort should be spared to reach this goal.

Ever since I got to know how easily skin donation can save the lives of serious burns patients, I have felt strongly about the issue.

When I was little, I wanted to be a doctor. I was really interested in gore. My grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon and he had a lot of books in his library that I would just pore over. A lot of them had really horrible pictures of deformities.

I had worked on dogs for a couple of years developing a renal transplant operation. We had dogs running around with kidneys we had transplanted back into themselves.

I treated as few patients as I could as a medical student, and I never practiced medicine.

I began the study of medicine, impelled by a desire for knowledge of facts and of man. The resolution to do disciplined work tied me to both laboratory and clinic for a long time to come.

I moved to Harvard in 1998, and in 2000 the first kidney exchange in the United States was done at a hospital nearby. I started to think, 'Gee, there might be a way where I could help organize it, make it easier for people to find kidneys.'

Medical school education and post graduate education emphasize thoroughness.

More than 100 people are involved in a transplant operation... and we can't waste time and resources if there is a chance the caretakers aren't up for an awesome responsibility.

There are three subjects on which the knowledge of the medical profession in general is woefully weak; they are manners, morals, and medicine.

I think you should automatically donate your organs because that would turn the balance of organ donation in a huge way. I would donate whatever anybody would take, and I'd probably do the cremation bit.

I am not prepared to explain to a sick child with cystic fibrosis, facing death and fighting for breath, the ethical grounds that hinder the science which could save him.

A Patients' Bill of Rights is at the center of our national existence.

The “right to death" can easily become a threat to the life of patients whose treatment is hampered by lack of funds.

The cloning of human beings can corrupt the natural foundations of childbirth, consanguinity, motherhood and fatherhood. A child can become a sister to her mother, a brother to his father or a daughter to his or her grandfather. The psychological consequences of cloning are also extremely dangerous. A human being, who came to being as a result of this procedure, can feel not like an independent person but only "a copy" of someone who lives or lived before. It should be also considered that experiments with human cloning will inevitably produce as "by-products" numerous unfulfilled lives and, most probably, the emergence of a numerous unsustainable posterity. At the same time, the cloning of isolated organic cells and tissues is not an encroachment on the dignity of the personality and in a number of cases has proved helpful in the biological and medical practice.

Like other government research, big bucks academic research is done to understand the nature and structure of the universe or to understand life, which really means that it is either for blowing up the world or extending life, whichever comes first.

Today, with the Executive Order I am about to sign, we will bring the change that so many scientists and researchers, doctors and innovators, patients and loved ones have hoped for and fought for these past eight years: We will lift the ban on federal funding for promising embryonic stem cell research. Now, in recent years, when it comes to stem cell research, rather than furthering discovery, our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values. In this case, I believe the two are not inconsistent.

We could conquer cancer if we really wanted to.